ADATA is first to market with a retail product using SandForce's new B02 stepping controller. SURPRISE! TRIM is also fixed thanks to ADATA's new 5.0.7a firmware that's available for ADATA drives with SandForce 2000 Series controllers. Too little too late, or good things come to those who wait?

Bapco MobileMark 2012 1.5

MobileMark 2012 1.5 is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation and media consumption. Unlike benchmarks that only measure battery life, MobileMark 2012 measures battery life and performance simultaneously, showing how well a system design addresses the inherent tradeoffs between performance and power management.

Here we see the new B02 controller doing what it's meant to do in our Lenovo W530 with a six cell battery. The six cell is the small one, we didn't want to run this test on the large Lenovo 9-cell batteries since five hours was enough to show the differences in battery life.

The SX900 didn't break the record set by Kingston's B02 mSATA prototype and didn't match the new Phison controlled MyDigitalSSD BP4, but it sure did leave the V3.20 and V300 behind.

PCMark Vantage HDD Test - Power Draw

In this chart the ADATA SX900 is in black so that you can see it easier. We also see where the SX900 picks up the additional battery life, when the drive is sitting idle. The idle performance is lower than the other SandForce based drives. When working hard though the SX900 draws more power than most of the others, something we put squarely on the voltage regulators ADATA chose.

We've yet to see a company really build the ultimate notebook drive with the best components in every category, but the ADATA SX900 is getting close.